Update-monitors of yesteryear beware – the dark-times have come for your kind. For Phil Gyford has shown the way of the future with Haddock Blogs. It’s a very simple premise – a web-based interface that collates the various RSS/RDF feeds from a group of weblogs and assembles a contents page from them that updates each and every hour.
The potential for this kind of first-stage weblog content aggregation is huge – particularly for interest or social groups. Haddock being, in this case, a community of friends based around a mailing list. But you could do the same thing for all weblogs with an RSS feed if you wanted, or use category fields or clustering to form highly focused sites about anything from Buffy to PGP…